This catalog is published in conjunction with the exhibition Fuzzy Dark Spot at the Falckenberg Collection, Hamburg, from April 13 to November 3, 2019. It includes a preface by Dirk Luckow and an introduction by curator Wolfgang Oelze. The book offers comprehensive essays by Friedrich Wolfram Heubach, Thomas Macho, Claudia Reiche, Gerd Roscher and Siegfried Zielinski as well as explanations on the individual artworks.

The exhibition Fuzzy Dark Spot brings together video works by mostly Hamburg-based artists ranging from the 1970s to the present day, featuring historical and contemporary productions. The exhibition examines how video in art interprets social and media irritations and manipulations. The fields of this investigation include references in video art to television, the educational movement of the counter-public of the 1970s, as well as the use of video as a surveillance medium, a means of artistic narrative, a psychosocial mirror, and an instrument of self-optimization in the digital present. The major impact of video images on the collective memory and consciousness in the 20th and 21st centuries makes doubts about images, the uneasiness with the familiar, as well as the distrust of truth claims important subjects of artistic reflection. The title summarizes the common theme of the works in the exhibition: a nebulous, fuzzy dark spot, place, or condition.

“Wolfgang Oelze’s photographs and videos can be understood as artistic research into architecture and technology, cinematic images, and historical topography that describes the cave as a metaphor for how we approach the world and our abysses. This makes the artist a speleologist, but one who takes far more than the material nature of caves into account—and ultimately manifests our hidden unconscious.” (Sven Beckstette)

Supported by the Ministry of Culture and Media of the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg

“Motifs of inclusion and smoke are recurring visual elements in the photo and video work of Wolfgang Oelze. They characterize how he visually addresses voids, labyrinths, bunkers, mounds, quarries and catacombs, or fuzzy spots in various spaces, which first come across like places of memory without disclosing the contents of the memory. In some places, slender plumes of smoke arise without a visible source of fire, spreading like ground mist in the scattered sunlight like local ectoplasms, apparitions in haunted locations that invoke no wars, acts of violence, or sacrificial rituals. [....] They are the effects of the formlessness that correspond to one’s own unconscious – and a respect for the power of this unconscious.” (Thomas Macho)

The title implies a distinct combination of terms; “fuzzy” refers to the fibrous, diffused, the blurred... it introduces a dark and unconscious side. In a typical Google search, the expression “dark” locates itself fatefully between ”fuzzy” and “spot”. A fuzzy hyper-intelligence may manifest itself through the internet. Users of technical devices are often discussing ”fuzzy dark spots” in internet forums, asking each other questions about disturbing marks seen in their digital pictures. The spot thus finds it’s location between diffused stains and landmarks, designating both clarification and contamination of an image. The concepts of “good things” and “man is measure of all things” are also suggesting their incomprehensible, terrifying drawback by the marks mentioned above.

Does the dark feeling have a location, and what would that look like? This space not only relates to landscape, as in romantic paintings, but is located and visualized through psychology, neuroscience and genetics. The incomprehensibility of science naturally evokes questions concerning the unclear, the faulty, the blind spot. The complexity and fuzziness of these spaces invite artistic interaction. This obscure territory that is engaged then becomes a fascinating, dark place for imagining. Superstition, cinematic exaggeration, absurd concepts, enigmatic fragments, dissolving matter, and ruinous landscapes are materials for artistic manipulation, which are explored in this exhibition.

The literary scholar Thomas Gann is inspecting in his essay the paths of a search for those dark zones in the German literature of the 18th and 19th centuries; Thomas Gann “Logic of Blur 1800/1900: Dark Imaginations, Unknown Continents, Clouds, Hazy Air?”.